see i dont really have any issue with medicinal marijuana....or medicinal hemp.....i mean we have medical opioids afterall
what i do have an issue with is its not being treated like a medicine.
you can smoke marijuana.....get it baked into cookies and brownies.....candy....ect.....no other "medicine" gets baked into brownies, like i cant go to my pharmacy and get Crestor baked into a cookie, or light up a ibuprohpen joint.
if its the hemp or THC oil that is effective.....i dont see why they dont have it encapsulated into pills like all other medicine.
now i realize this thread is mostly relate to hemp, and not necessarily pot......but the 2 are closely linked.
I hope I can clarify this some.
Oh no, it's "pot". Cannabis. Hemp does not contain these chemicals, it's fiber, it's rope. It's as good a medicine as a sheet of paper or piece of rope.
You're right about opiates and opioids. They start as plants, but what makes them legal as drugs is that they are first extracted, THEN modified chemically to isolate a certain alkaloid and turn that into a pure salt (which is then ironically mixed with a bunch of other shit to water it down). Cannabis is too difficult and expensive at the moment to synthesize and extracts or the whole plant is all that's available. So to the FDA, it's just a plant. This dates back to the "pure drug and food act" in the late 1800's/early 1900's, back when Coke had "coke" in it (I bet it tasted like shit though).
They do have fentanyl lollipops, FWIW. "A teaspoon of sugar helps the medicine go down" --there are many candy flavored cough syrups. You can get cannabis in pills too. Just not at the pharmacy. Like I said, FDA can't control it because it's plant and plant extracts. In some countries where the laws aren't so outdated and obscure, they are allowed to use extracts as medicine. Sativex is an extract that is sublingual and sold in UK.
In Holland they do have prescribed cannabis you buy at the pharmacy. But from what I understand most people buy it at coffee shops because the government stuff isn't any good. There is ONE guy I'm aware of that still gets his cannabis from the US govt. too, he smokes joints in front of the capitol as often as possible to protest. He gets a big ass can every month. Rolled joints. He says it's garbage too, and there used to be around a hundred or so in the program but the rest died.
For some, putting it in foodstuffs helps reduce the stigma. For others, they prefer it to be in a pill. If I was a kid, I may want it in candy, but if I were a parent I may want the kid to see it as a medicine or a pill. My cat, she eats her meds mixed in food, I know of elderly patients that have to be given their drugs in applesauce. It's nice to have a choice, no? And if it's being used for medicine, or an adult wants to use it for any personal reason, whose business is it or how they take it? The fact it's illegal federally is the biggest side effect of cannabis, that's been said by more doctors than I can count. It was in Nixon's "Blue Ribbon Panel" too, the one he threw away after reading only the abstract.
And again, CBD is different than THC. It WILL NOT get you high. AT ALL. It will actually kill a marijuana buzz. It's like some of the other alkaloids in opium. Some can be converted into opioids but will not have any other effects (most poppies are grown for thebaine now BTW, not morphine; thebaine will kill you if you take it, won't get you high or kill pain, it has to be modified into morphine, oxycodone, etc.). But like I said, with cannabis you simply stop at the extraction.
But I ultimately agree with you, medical cannabis should be sold in the damn pharmacy if for no other reason than to put it under insurance. A pure pill form would be great. I also feel recreational cannabis needs to be left alone because I kinda like it that the cartels lost that share of business here. Fuck them. It's also done a lot to "clean up" some shitty areas. It's been a good thing overall, it really has.
Being a Schedule 1 drug eliminates it from being prescribed by REAL doctors. My pain management doctor mandates drug testing for all patients and if you test positive for THC you can not be prescribed Opiated pain meds. I believe that this is a government mandate as the story is the same for all the Docs that I have had a relationship with. Despite it working well and reducing the amount of Opiates needed, use THC and get no prescribed Opiates. Unbelievable that they will give you addictive, potentially killer drugs if you test positive for pot. Either give up the pot or buy your drugs on the street. Really fucked up for chronic pain patients if you ask me. I don’t think the current administration is going to weaken this stance.
Tazman... Tazmania is where most all legal opiate crops are grown FWIW. They grow thebaine strains because they can't be abused and provide the most amount of precursor for production of almost all opioids.
About doctors... Yes and no. Depends on state again (and also your doctor in this situation). Doctors can't "prescribe" it because it's a plant, like I said. They can only write prescriptions for FDA approved medicines, usually synthetic salts. Doctors can recommend it though, and it comes on a regular prescription too and in WA it's basically treated as such. My pain doctor, he'll write you one if you request it and if he thinks it'll help. No cost. He'd rather you be on that than some other drugs anyway. In legal states like WA, the VA can't deny you pain meds for failing a piss test anymore either. All depends on your state. This was settled by vets a decade ago when they went before the VA panel in DC to protest MI VA's practice of cutting off pain meds for patients that used cannabis. They even went so far as to say VA docs could recommend it but that any fallout would be on them (so as a practice, VA doesn't, however, MY VA doctor has recommended it too!).
Hell, I WISH it worked for me. Being able to go down the street and get it when I need it would be nice. How would I do it? Well, I'd probably use the most cost effective form, and if that's vaporizing it or taking a pill or cooking it in a brownie I could care less. I'm far more interested in results than I am appearances though. As it is, I'm stuck taking these damn pills --which is more of a hassle and waste of time than anything else if you take them as prescribed, pharmacists and insurance makes it damn near impossible to fill a pain prescription anymore, and many doctors are afraid to write em. May be soon in order to alleviate pain, you HAVE to break one law or another.
IMO/E, anti-drug fuckers aren't much different than anti-gun fuckers. They generally have about the same education on the respective matters and have opinions that far outweigh their knowledge. It's always someone that doesn't do something that wants everyone else to comply with their world view, or else. I personally give two fucks what anyone does provided it doesn't negatively impact me.
And if legal cannabis will curb meth use around here, which in turn will reduce crime, I'm all for it.
I've also heard legal heroin (I mean no-shit IV heroin supplied by the govt.) has done a LOT to cut down on crime associated with it. Cartels go out of business overnight when they can get clean dope from the govt., and crime goes away when they don't have to steal to get it. Communicable disease, which affects all of us, also goes down dramatically as do the costs to deal with them. See, the relapse rate for heroin is 98%, so short of giving it to them that's really the only way to affect the associated problems (in totalitarian countries where they kill drug users, they STILL have rampant problems, decades later). They aren't gonna quit unless they WANT to. Period. So I've got a pretty lax view on drugs, again, I'm about results and I haven't seen any good results until they started legalizing drugs.
Well, the first chapter of my book is done. Sorry. There's just a lot of misinformation out there and unless you see it first hand, you really have no way of knowing, you know?
